FORT WORTH-A high-profile owners' mix at a key crossroads in North Tarrant County has a new player. A Dallas-based investment group has scooped up 52 acres in an off-market transaction with auto dealership giant, Don Davis.
The hard-corner acquisition, with 101,000 sf in six buildings, is located at the junction of Interstate 35 W and Golden Triangle Boulevard or FM 1709 in North Tarrant County. The other three corners are controlled by Hillwood, another locally based investment group and the Texas Permanent School Fund, which has been shopping for a joint venture partner for some time. Like its neighbors, retail development is on the mixed-use agenda for the new owner of the southwestern corner.
Lester Day, principal in NAI Huff Partners, tells GlobeSt.com that he's fielded three calls in less than a week from retail developers who want to work out a flip or joint venture on building out the prized land. The buyer's broker says it will be 18 months before anything happens on the site since 74,000 sf in five of the six buildings are leased to Regency Vans of Texas, which was recently bought by Tecstar Automotive Group of Goshen, IN. As a result, an empty 27,000-sf building will hit the leasing market.
"In the past 12 months, this corridor has gone from investment-grade to development-grade," Day says. As a result, land prices have spiked 40% to 50%. Large tracts are fetching north of $5 per sf.
Day says the off-market talks wrapped up about six months after his first call to Davis, who had owned the land since the middle 1990s. "I guess our timing was right," Day says. The seller had an in-house real estate pro, Wayne Winters, handling its side of the bargaining.
Day says the developable land could hold at least one million sf based on a 20% coverage ratio. It is "premature," he says, to predict if the existing buildings will be razed or retooled. Regardless of that decision, the hard corner is going to be divvied into pad sites for big-box retail, office, tech and manufacturing buildings, says Day, who will be marketing the land once the site plan's done. "It will be a very nice, long-term, 'A' investment-grade hold," he adds.
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